The scarcity of cloud skills is a challenge for those who provide cloud services to customers, and for business that want to migrate from on-prem to the cloud.
This is according to Oracle and its channel partner and distributor Axiz, who believe collaboration can help to address the skills deficit, as wells as other cloud migration challenges.
The two partners jointly hosted a customer and partner summit last week to showcase what they can do to help partners emerge as reliable cloud service providers to their customers.
Oracle's public sector cloud executive Ibrahim Mthombeni said, “If the customer does not have the skills to transform or move from on-premises to cloud, then that creates a huge gap. Digital transformation is here .... and we need to look at how best to help our customers transform.”
He added that working together with distributors and partners was paramount to achieving this. Oracle uses Axiz’s distribution capabilities as well as Axiz’s resource base of channel partners to deliver cloud propositions to customers. Oracle makes training, certification and incentives available to Axiz, who then uses these to identify and develop channel partners with the skills and expertise to help customers migrate to the cloud.
In addition, Axiz offers training courses on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure which are freely available for both customers and patners, said Mthombeni.
Multi-cloud backing
Oracle and Axiz support multi-cloud because they say it gives end-users flexibility and the ability to leverage the capabilities of different cloud vendors to build the most appropriate applications and workloads.
“Multi-cloud provides for a range of different business and operational requirements, like business agility or access to best-of-breed technology," said Mthombeni. "One of the key ways in which this applies to the public cloud is that it enables the public sector to develop applications and solutions in a secure manner and also enables them to keep data in country (sovereignty)."
He said Oracle had made considerable investments in its local datacentre over the past two years, and moving its on-premises workloads to the cloud was a key to reaping from these investments.
“Oracle has invested in deploying the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) that supports all Oracle services and features, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware solution, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite.”
He said Oracle’s partnership with Azure makes it possible to use the capabilities of both vendors to build multi-cloud workload and application deployments.
Andrew Moodley, Axiz chief digital and marketing officer, said Axiz deals with both large partners – who are relatively independent and only need access to vendors and solutions – and smaller ones who rely on them to provide the steppingstone they require to become Oracle partners.
“Diversity presents exciting opportunities and allows the smaller vendors and partners access to technology and expertise they may not ordinarily have access to,” Moodley added.
The event also highlighted the importance of maintaining a people-centred approach to technology. “Problems are solved by people and solutions are developed by people; what technology does is augment human problem-solving ability. Along with tools, we must have people who are able to use those tools,” said Moodley.
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